Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Obama Fatigue

He has proposed a budget with a level of spending that sends deficits to record levels!

Obama wants to assume that by 2012, the last year of his first term, revenues will exceed the average of the previous twenty-five years (indeed, the last fifty years!) for every year from then on. He assumes unprecedented revenues to start flowing in, year after year, from 2012 onward. He also assumes unspecified savings in those years way past his first term.

He puts the deficit at 12.3% of GDP in 2009. Throughout the Great Depression, whether under Hoover or FDR, the deficit never exceeded 6% of GDP. Under Reagan, with his inherited recession and his tax cuts, it never exceeded 6% of GDP. Under George W. Bush, with his inherited recession and his tax cuts, it never even got to 4% of GDP.

In fact, in only five years since 1930 has the deficit exceeded 6% of GDP: 1942-46. It has exceeded Obama's 12.3% only from 1942 to 1945.

That was World War II. Then, defense spending was about 40% of GDP. Now it is about 4%.

Obama projects debt held by the public at 59% of GDP in 2009, and about 65% of GDP thereafter, as far as his projections go.

You have to go back to Truman to see debts that high. And Truman was paying off World War II costs. It's been below 50% of GDP since 1957. For the first time since then, it will exceed that level this year, going from 41% to 59% of GDP in a single year.

This is a terrible budget. In Obama's first term, it is even worse than my predictions. Into his second term and beyond, it is still bad, and held together only with rosy assumptions on both the revenue and spending sides. When things can be expected to get really bad, by 2020 and beyond, he makes no projections at all.

Obama also had the great idea to save money with a plans to have our military veterans to use their private insurance to cover combat related injuries! I'm a military veteran! Luckily veterans groups, learning of the possibility last month, quickly mobilized to oppose it and he dropped it.

What kind of President would quickly abandon his moral responsibility to the men and women who have sacrificed so much for our nations freedoms?

The kind who would want an organization with voter fraud investigations in twelve states to partner with Census to help count the number of Americans in the country.

With many criminal indictments and convictions having been leveled in numerous states against ACORN the concern is why the Census should be "partnering" with an organization that has so frequently bribed people to register voters.

What is at stake from an accurate census is huge. The allocation of seats in Congress, and ultimately questions of who controls it, depend on an accurate count. Much of the money Congress spends is allocated based on the census.

ACORN is a "bipartisan" organization in name only. Giving it any type of official role in the process, including making it a so-called "Census Bureau partner," is disturbing.

For a nonpartisan organization such as the Census, ACORN's political connections are also troubling. Last year, the Obama campaign paid ACORN $800,000 to register voters and do other work. ABC News' Jake Tapper caught Obama campaign officials in numerous attempts to hide Mr. Obama's past connections with ACORN. Mr. Obama also gave ACORN money when he served on the board of the Woods Fund in Chicago. For all the work that he has done for ACORN over the years, Investor's Business Daily called Mr. Obama "ACORN's Senator."

In sixty days or so he has made some terrible decisions and they seem to just keep coming.

Only one thousand three hundred and ninety-five more days until he is out. It couldn't come any faster if it was tomorrow for me.